Does the recent version of Clear Linux support legacy bios without uefi?

Q&A
1

You can see “Remove EFI hard requirement” committed on 14 Feb

However, many people, including me, have reported clear linux not working on legacy bios.

Has anyone successfully installed Clear Linux on bare metal without uefi?

I hope this problem will be solved quickly

2

I cannot try it myself because I don’t have computer on BIOS.

I guess one problem is the current guide instructs you to make a UEFI live ISO and that’s why you failed starting the installer.

Probably you can try to burn a BIOS live ISO as people did for other distros.

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Note: we still don’t support grub. We’ve tested this in gnome boxes, and it works with legacy boot. But largely it’s untested on real hardware.

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How did you specify mbr install? Can you do it though the clr-installer installer? Surely not.
Is there a arch-like way to install it then? Any info on how to install without uefi would be helpfull.

5

As far as my experience is concerned, I had no problem installing Clear Linux on Non-UEFI laptop - Thinkpad T410, using standard CLR Live USB burned by Rufus as MBR USB stick. Boots fine and installs to hard drive with no problem.

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Neat. Maybe my laptop is wierd because ubunt worked

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Hard drive must be partitioned as GPT to install.

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That’s seems to be true. And AFAIK, recent versions of Windows defaults to GPT instead of MBR. Or does this only applies to UEFI Windows installs?

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For latest Windows installs:

  • MBR booted installation media will not install Windows on GPT disk
  • To install Windows on GPT disk installation media must be booted in UEFI mode
  • I will try to check if UEFI booted will install on MBR disk.

In relation to Clear Linux:
It does boot from MBR media with no problem. Having booted for install:

  • If disk is GPT, installation proceeds and completes no problem.
  • If disk is MBR installation starts and shortly into installation process fails with error updating partition table.
    This failure significantly limits possibility of installs of Clear Linux on existing disks, which may have existing OSs or data on them, although plenty of space for CL left. If this becomes fixed at some point that would be great…